Hurricane

Hurricane

Update:  In the summer of 2015 Hurricane was diagnosed with a terminal heart failure and given 6 months to live.  She almost doubled that, but she finally passed away in the summer of 2016.  We miss you, Hurricane!

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Hurricane and her sister Zephyr were our “mail order brides,” meaning they were the only cats we adopted before meeting.  (Spitfire had come up from the Gulf Coast, but we actually got our pick of 15+ kittens in the van.)  Via our friend who did rescue on the Missisippi Gulf Coast, we had the shelter sent us “two short haired black and white girl kittens.”  She got everything right except the short hair, as evidenced by the photo.

Hurricane is a diva, with a huge ego that has survived getting play-hunted by her stronger sister Zephyr on a regular basis for her entire life!  And yet, while Hurricane seems not to like her sister much, whenever either of them is challenged by another cat the other sister immediately runs to her aid!

Hurricane often claims Deb’s chair at breakfast, and gets very upset if moved.  Many times we pull a third chair up to the table.

five cat morningA lazy, weekend morning.  5 cats are around, but our little diva Hurricane gets the lap!

I have a confession about her name:  many people assume that her name is from Hurricane Katrina.  In fact, she was born two years after the storm.  Read on for the actual inspiration…

HurricaneThis is a contemporary photo of a Hurricane fighter, one of two fighters used by the British during the “Battle of Britain” in 1940, when Great Britain stood alone and Hitler’s air force tried–and failed–to knock out Royal Air Force Fighter Command in order to make a cross-channel invasion of England possible  (Had the British fighter defenses been knocked out, German bombers could have protected an invasion fleet.)  Had the British defenses not held, WW2 would have ended before the Untied States got involved!  But the held and the planned German invasion of England was cancelled.

In my free time I have read a lot about the Battle of Britain, a couple of cats got named after the British aircraft which helped save the world.

 

spitfiresThe other British fighter from 1940 was the more famous (and numerically inferior but qualitatively superior) Spitfire.  (Shown at right in formation in a photo from 1940.)

 

 

 

 

 

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Of course, Hurricane’s name also reflects the fact that, when she and her sister first arrived, she was doing backflips and wouldn’t hold still at all!  Here’s the one second I managed to get her to stop moving.

If you look closely at both the photo and the first photo of this post, it appears that her nose is dirty. That’s actually that’s just the color of her skin–a fact we learned the hard way when she got very upset as we tried to “clean the dirt off” our kitten’s nose!

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